The 0.4-meter class of telescopes is currently in production at the Santa Barbara headquarters of LCOGT. These telescopes are based around a modified Meade telescope with a custom equatorial mount, and high specification CCD cameras. This class of telescope will also be available for non-professional astronomers (of all ages) to use.
The 0m4 telescopes are supported on a C-ring equatorial mount, with all hardware including focus and collimation supplied by LCOGT. Each 0m4 telescopes can be used with one of two available imaging cameras:
An SBIG STX6303 is the main science camera on each 0m4 telescope, mounted in the straight through Cassegrain position:
- 2Kx3K pixels, each 0.58arcsec, for a total Field of View (FoV) of 20x30 arcmin
- Single 14-position filter wheel containing Johnson/Cousins UBVRI, Sloan primed ugriz and O-III and H-alpha narrow band filters
An Andor Luca-R EM-CCD is mounted on a side port, with a 45-degree mirror that can be inserted to send light to the Luca (this blocks the SBIG).
- 1000x1000 pixels, each 0.3arcsec (after a x2 Barlow), for a 5x5arcmin FoV
- Johnson/Cousins and Sloan filters
- This camera will be capable of fast photometry, and Lucky Imaging
The image below shows the SBIG camera in the straight through position, and the Luca-R camera to the side, each with their own filter wheels. The moving diagonal mirror to select between these is inside the grey box.
Additional 0m4 robotic mounts will be made available (in Aqawan clamshell enclosures) to facilitate additional astronomical instrumentation. The image below shows one such "cross-beam" C-ring mount in our workshops, supporting a Celestron 8-inch telescope with Deep Space Spectrograph (DSS, indicated to left), and an ASA astrograph with SBIG CCD. This is currently being tested on-sky at Santa Barbara. All 0m4 mounts share the same hardware drive and software control mechanisms with our 1m telescopes.
Context Cameras
Wide field "context" cameras at each of our network sites cycle through BVriz filters (spanning our optical observing range) every ~2 minutes, measuring instantaneous throughput (transparency) against Tycho, APASS and primary standards from Landolt, Stetson and Sloan. These context cameras include 200mm f/2.8 Nikon lenses, and the ASA astrograph shown above, attached to SBIG CCDs and filter wheels.
Comprehensive transparency measurements (cf. SkyProbe) can be used to inform and calibrate our data, to characterize, monitor and inter-compare our sites and equipment, and to select photometric periods when traditional calibrations of Target against Standard fields can be optimally and automatically performed. We also measure system bandpasses including atmosphere, mirrors, filters and detectors, and compare our system bandpasses with those for UBVRI and ugriz standard systems.
